A case study
Organization: Khalifa University
Industry: Education
Using OpManager since: 2019
Internationally top-ranked Khalifa University of Science and Technology is the sole educational institution in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) providing research and academic programs that address the strategic, scientific, and industrial challenges facing the UAE’s knowledge economy transformation and our rapidly evolving world.
The Abu Dhabi-based university's IT infrastructure includes about 1,000 switches, 400 servers, dozens of routers, and firewalls in six separate data centers with distributed architecture. All of these need to be constantly monitored to enable continuous learning for students. Moreover, having a hybrid network, and the university's recent merger with two other organizations made network monitoring a challenging task.
Previously, Khalifa University's IT department used open source solutions including Nagios and others, but uncovered problems when the team needed to add devices. This prompted the IT team to evaluate other solutions, and it invited different vendors to demonstrate a proof of concept (POC) on its IT environment.
After technical evaluations of all POCs, the Khalifa University IT team selected ManageEngine OpManager as its network monitoring solution. Shabbir Faisal, Network Operations Specialist at Khalifa University, says that cost, scalability, and usability were the main reasons the IT team selected OpManager.
Khalifa University primarily uses device availability monitors, and tracks the CPU, disk, and memory utilization in the network. It deployed OpManager to measure CPU, memory, disk usage, availability and packet loss.
Faisal cited user-specific dashboards, threshold-based alerts, and easy installation and configuration as favorite OpManager features. These enable the Khalifa University IT team to efficiently utilize these OpManager components to oversee, on a daily basis.
With the recent merger with two organizations and a hybrid network, everything from virtual devices to storage infrastructure, to network devices routers, switches, and firewalls are now monitored by OpManager continuously.
The benefit for Khalifa University IT team is considerable time saved compared to the IT teams former manual daily process of tracking the network, servers, virtual devices, storage systems, databases, plus files and folders. Now, the IT team can focus on anticipating and troubleshooting issues. Once daunting tasks are now a cakewalk utilizing OpManager.
Faisal says OpManager is easy to use, and offers excellent support.
"Brief reports on each devices is helping us achieve our SLA targets. Apart from reports, OpManager also helps me troubleshoot issues like latency and bandwidth utilization," he explained.
ManageEngine OpManager is a network management platform that helps organizations of all sizes and service providers manage their data centers and IT infrastructure efficiently and cost-effectively. Automated workflows, intelligent alerting engines, discovery rules, and extendable templates enable IT teams to set up a 24/7 monitoring system quickly and easily. Do-it-yourself add-ons extend the scope of management to include network change and configuration management, IP address management, as well as monitor networks, applications, databases, and virtualization. For more information about OpManager, visit manageengine.com/opmanager.